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Saturday, 28 March 2015

In days gone by rabbis would
use the Shabbat before Passover to deliver a long sermon on the importance of a
thorough observance of all the many intricate details and laws of the
forthcoming festival. (Traditionally they only gave sermons then, and on the
Shabbat between the New Year and the Day of Atonement).

And these laws were almost
endless: laws about cleaning the house of hametz
(leavened food), laws about what foods can and can’t be eaten, laws about how
the seder has to be done, laws about making everything adhere to the highest
standards of kashrut. Holiness was in the detail – and the rabbi took it upon
himself to instruct his community on how to enact that holiness in the home
-and then the men would go home and
make sure their wives did it...

Well, those days are I think
long gone, at least in non-Orthodox communities: not just the patriarchal attitudes, but the
stance of the rabbi in relation to the importance of strict adherence to the
fine-grained details of the various laws that have accumulated around the
festival about what must and mustn’t happen.

For progressive Jews, there
has been a distinctive change of focus in relation to holiness. Traditionally, there
are two categories of law. The first was called beyn adam la’makom – ‘between a person and their Maker’ – and they
were all the ritual laws around food, Shabbat observance, daily practices of prayer-life,
the clothes one wore, all the details of festival celebration: no aspect of
life went unregulated in terms of ritual. And all rituals were designed to
create a life of holiness. Progressive Judaism still pays attention to this
category – through with less obsessionality than in the past. But a much
greater emphasis is placed now on enacting holiness within that other
traditional category of Jewish tradition beyn
adam l’chavero – ‘between a person and their neighbour’, in other words in
the realm of the inter-personal.

So those aspects of the
divine that are connected with justice and compassion and generosity, that we
have it in our power to do, to enact, to live, have come much more to the
forefront of our thinking as a locus of holiness. How we relate to people –
family, colleagues, community, the wider UK community we live in, the world
community we live in – this is the forum where we make choices to follow (or
not) Jewish teachings about righteousness and charity and care for others; where
we try to follow the divine vision of how we are to relate to each other,
neighbours and strangers alike, Jews and non-Jews alike.

The idea that holiness
adheres to precise attention to ritual law, to doing specific and distinctive
rites and practices that only Jews do, goes right back of course to Biblical
Judaism. We are reading over these weeks, in the annual cycle of readings from the Torah,
from the book of Leviticus. The laws concerning the priesthood and the
sacrificial cult take up a whole book of the five books of Moses - the middle
book Leviticus - as if to say: this is the centre of religious life, holy
living. And we still read those texts today, even though once the Temple in
Jerusalem was destroyed in the year 70 CE, that whole world disappeared, never – we hope! – to
return. We are left to make of it what we can, to interpret it, or re-interpret
it in ways that might connect to our lives today, even though the Temple is no
more and Judaismmoved on, transformed
by the rabbis into a far more inclusive religion where everyone has their own
relationship to God unmediated by the hierarchy of priests with all their
sacrificial rules.

Yet the dominance of that
kind of religious practice - focused on the observance of precise details of
ritual law - still acts as a gravitational force in our thinking about
holiness. Consciously or unconsciously it makes us believe – or feel - that
holiness is centred on Jewish ritual law of one kind or another. Priests and
sacrifices may have gone, but the specific foods you eat still counts in God’s
eyes, as does whether or not all the letters in the scroll can still be read
clearly within the mezuzah on the
doorposts of your homes.

But what would it feel like,
look like - our Jewish lives - if holiness was weighted in the other direction,
the inter-personal domain? If it was
about our relationships to each other? If it was about ethics, how we spoke to
and about each other, how we behaved with each other, how we acted towards
those we lived with and amongst, and those who live far from us, whom we might
never meet but who might be looking to us for support and aid and assistance?

What if Pesach/Passover was a
time when at seder night, or during the seven days of the festival itself, as
we eat our unleavened bread, the bread of affliction we call it (Deuteronomy
16:3), we really took that message of affliction to heart and saw how the
purpose of the festival was to sensitise us to those who are still afflicted,
still oppressed, still living in situations of un-freedom?

Sure, this festival is one
where the national narrative of the Jews is stressed – we were slaves and then we
became freed from bondage, freed to serve God rather than human despots; with
the exodus from Egypt the beginning of that extraordinary mythic narrative of a
people bound together by a shared experience of liberation, followed by
revelation, followed by the long journey into the promised land; this great
story of peoplehood which we tell over and over again, as we forge one more
link in this glorious chain of memory and history and survival of a tribe who
became a people who became a nation, indeed a distinctive trans-national
community of shared values – of course Pesach is about particularism, it’s
about us, our particular Jewish identity and the celebration of that particular
identity.

But Pesach/Passover is more
than that. Because as we eat our bread of affliction, that symbolic food
doesn’t just point inwards, to our past and our history, it points outwards, it
points towards the vision of Judaism that says we Jews have a mission, a
purpose in this world, and it is beyond
ourselves. Jewish survival is not for its own sake. It’s not a destination
for the Jewish journey. It’sa means to
an end. And the end, or the aim, is to bring the values and ethics of holiness
into the world, the larger world. There is that traditional phrase, from the
prophets, that Jews are to be a ‘light to the nations’ (Isaiah 42:6; 49:6). Our
particularism is only one part of the story. The other part of the story is our
universalism.

Particularism is about
survival and continuity and distinctiveness. Universalism is about what it is
all for, it’s about purpose. And our purpose is to model and enact holiness beyn adam l’chavero – ‘between a person
and their neighbour’. And in our world today, everyone has become our
‘neighbour’. It is only in our own times that we can begin to glimpse the
inter-connectedness of all of us on this fragile planet, where all our fates
are inter-meshed, where poverty and affliction and slavery in one part of the
world has knock on consequences for our lives (and all of these plagues are
here in London, and the UK; I’m not naive about this, they aren’t split off
from us in some far off lands we can’t even place on a map, they are literally
round the corner).

So when we eat our bread of
affliction, instead of complaining about how tasteless it is, how bored we get
with it, how it gives us constipation, or the opposite, maybe we can reflect on
what the purpose of this act of holy eating is really about, what it’s message
to us really is.

Which is to alert us to the
need to enact, in our own small way, the mission and vision of Judaism. Which
includes addressing those living with affliction, and oppression and lack of freedom.
And you don’t have to look far to find causes to support, charities to give
money to, issues where your voice can make a difference.There are so many places where attention needs
to go – it might be about the homeless in the UK , or contributing to food
banks, it might be about supporting refugees here or abroad, it might be
through London Citizens campaigns, or Amnesty, or World Jewish Relief, or
Oxfam, or the New Israel Fund.

As you taste that bread of
affliction this year, as you crunch on it joyfully or resignedly, here is
something else to chew over as it goes down. Are you going to put your money
where your mouth is? Are you going to lend a hand practically? Are you going to
commit yourself to something new this year as part of your holy living? Because
that is where holiness is now, for us, and you can be enacted through tzedakah, money; or tzedakah, acts of tzedek,
righteousness. You are free to choose what your new forum for holy activity is.
What you are not free to do is pretend that the point of Pesach/Passover is
just to make sure that you only eat foods with the right labels on them, and
then you are done.

A last few words about one
charity in particular that I have developed aconnection to this year. It’s partly for family reasons, but that’s not
the point. If you want a new charity to become involved with, if only
financially, and you can’t come up with something on your own, have a look at
the work of World Jewish Relief They
have a campaign at the moment in relation to their ongoing work with the Jews of Ukraine and on their website www.wjr.org.ukthey have a message from their Chair who has just come
back from a visit to Zaparozhye in eastern Ukraine where they have been working
for the last 15 years. And his report is both heart-breaking and inspiring.
They work with Jews and non-Jews there, though their priority is the Jewish
community – they have been addressing poverty, repairing homes, finding jobs,
helping build up a sense of Jewish community in a remarkable way. But the civil
war has had disastrous consequences – there are now a million displaced people
in Ukraine. And WJR is looking after 300 internally displaced Jews in
Zaparozhye, housing them, making sure they have enough to eat, looking after
their welfare, providing medicine (the cost of which is prohibitive),
re-training them.

But they can’t address the
fears of a young father for example, who fled his home and who is too scared to
register for employment in case he is conscripted into the army. "We did not want this conflict. We can't believe it has happened.
It was unthinkable...to fight against men who, a year ago, were your neighbours
in a war for which you feel nothing – it’s intolerable”. Zaparozhye – a
European city of 700,000 a couple of hours from Kiev - has received 100,000
refugees in this last 18 months, it’s put
an unsustainable pressure on resources, the local currency has been devalued by
300%, and for WJR’s on-going clients life is becoming quite dire.

Pensions and disability allowances barely meet
utility bills. Food, especially healthy food, is ever more expensive and,
without help those who need medicine simply can’t afford it. These are the
descendents of those Ukrainian Jews we are happy to read Hasidic stories about,
those dead Jews safely confined to the pages of storybooks and nostalgia. But some
of WJR’s clients - Jews in 21st century Europe - will die unless the charity supplements
what they receive, which helps buy the medicines that keep them alive.

Anyway, it’s not my intention to create guilt
feelings, and what I’ve said is only one side of the story because the Chair
also reports on the extraordinary work being done by the inspirational leaders
of the Jewish Community Centre there, which WJR built and supports, and is bursting with life and activity, with a strong sense
of Jewish tradition and heritage; it’s involved in pioneering work with the
disabled and other disadvantaged groups, and is also an active participant in
civil society contributing expertise and commitment that others benefit from.
The JCC is the only building in the entire region that has disabled access and they
are active participants in campaigning to improve conditions for those with
disabilities in a place where disability rights are, as the Chair says, in the
dark ages. This is what it means to
bea ‘light to the nations’.

So, in brief, if you are
looking for a way this Pesach as you eat you bread of affliction, to do
something from the heart, to do something heart-warming - rather than just
suffering from heartburn – send them some money, take out a standing order. Or
find another charity to support. Holiness isn’t in some remote realm away from
daily life, it isn’t confined to the minutiae of Jewish ritual observance, it’s
in the down-to-earth everyday choices we make to enact the vision of Judaism beyn adam l’chavero, between us and our
neighbours, known and unknown, near and far, Jew and non-Jew alike.

I wish you a healthy and
productive Pesach. [loosely based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, March 28th 2015]

Sunday, 8 March 2015

I want to think with you
about jealousy. Can there be anyone reading this who hasn’t felt it? Anyone who
hasn’t experienced the pain of feeling excluded, feeling that others have got
something going on between them that you aren’t part of? That someone else is
preferred, rather than you? ‘Jealousy in the heart makes one’s bones rot’
(Proverbs 14: 30) – jealousy is corrosive, once it gets inside you it’s hard to
get rid of it.

Shakespeare, famously,
created awhole play around it: Othello.
And a character, Iago, who sets up Othello to feel jealousy in relation to his
wife Desdemona - and then (and we are
appalled and fascinated by the cynicism and irony of it) has the chutzpah to warn the Moor: ‘Oh beware my lord, of jealousy. It is the
green-eyed monster that doth mock the meat it feeds on’ : i.e. jealousy is a
monster that makes vicious sport with the victims it devours...Of course it is
Iago, as well as jealousy itself, that is such a monster.

And we see Othello tearing
himself apart with jealousy, creating such murderous feelings in him that he
ends up killing the woman he loves. It’sa terrifying play, but one that we are drawn to and relate to because
jealousy is a universal emotion, one we all can recognise has been at some
stage roused in us, even if it isn’t a constant companion (though it might be).

Jealousy of course often
comes up in couples, between partners about other relationships – jealousy is
always about triangles. But it can be between siblings over who is a parent’s favourite,
real or imagined. The Torah is full of those kind of stories of sibling jealousy,
Genesis in particular. And feelings like this can last a lifetime.

Or jealousy can be between
friends - who is closer to who. In all
sets of relationships jealousy is waiting , green-eyed monster that it is, to rear
its ugly head. We so much want to be special, to be chosen, to be the one and
only one – for someone, for anyone – it’s a desire of the heart from our
earliest months and years, and the frustrations around this basic human
instinct are always available to be stirred up in us, to ‘make our bones rot’ –
to make us feel rotten, as we might say.

We are just built that way,
it seems – some people feel it stronger than others, some people are more
haunted by it than others, but for some it can feel unshakeable, well nigh unbearable, once we are in the grip of it. Because it is
omnipresent in our natures, you can feel – should feel – very blessed if that
monster is only a rare visitor to your heart and soul.

The fantasy of not having competitors
for our love interest’s affections - a mother’s love, or a father’s love, or a
partner’s love – is very powerful. We might profoundly wish that jealousy could
be exorcised from our emotional lives – but ‘dream on’, as they say, because
jealousy is here to stay, it’s part of our humanity. And it’s so powerful a
psychic reality that – and this might surprise us – God also feels it, it
seems. According to the Torah it is fully present as a divine reality as well
as a human one.

But what on earth – or in
heaven – does that mean? what are our Biblical storytellers getting at when
they describe even God, the Holy One of Israel, as being consumed by this
bone-rotting, dementing emotion?Not
just consumed by it but, as we read in our Torah portion today (Exodus 34),
defined by this emotion of jealousy. It couldn’t be stated more clearly: ‘Don’t
worship another god’, says the Holy One, ‘ki
Adonai kana sh’mo, for the eternal One, his essence, his name, is Jealousy’
– and then as if you haven’t got the point already, it repeats it: ‘he is a
jealous God’ - el kana hu (Exodus 34:14).

This isn’t the first time we find
God’s jealousy spoken about in the Torah. It’s there at the very beginning of
the Ten Commandments. God gets straight
down to business: ‘I am the God who brought you out of the land of Egypt – you
shall have no other gods but me, you shouldn’t make any graven images of them...’
And He goes on about this at some length – no images, no likenesses, nothing
should remind you that I, Adonai, am in competition for your affection. It’s all
slightly obsessive, as if there’s some kind of insecurity in God that keeps bursting through: ‘...don’t
worship other gods, or serve them, for...’ – and then it’s said straight out, ki anochi Adonai Eloheycha el kana’ (Exodus
20:5): ‘...for I the Eternal your God am
a jealous God’. This scene is set at Sinai, where God reveals Himself – but
perhaps reveals more about Himself than He is consciously aware of, so to
speak. (Does God have an unconscious?).

So by the time we get to our
sedrah, we shouldn’t be that surprised to hear this repeated - about God’s
jealous nature – though here it’s spelled out even more starkly. This jealousy
is part of his very essence. So what are we to make of this? We rabbis in our
sermons usually prefer to talk about those other qualities, earlier in the
chapter: the God of compassion and lovingkindness, long-sufferingand merciful – Adonai, Adonai, el rachum v’chanun...(34: 6-7),all those emotions which we are encouraged to find within ourselves
and live out from within ourselves, all those divine qualities that reside
within the human heart.

But jealousy – what are we supposed
to do with that divine quality? Can jealousy ever be benign? Something to
cultivate in ourselves, like those other qualities? Bible translators are
sometimes uncomfortable with this theme of jealousy: the one we use in our
synagogue fudges it: ‘...you must not worship any other god, because the Lord (Adonai), whose name is Impassioned, is
an impassioned God.’ (Etz Hayim p.542).

It’s true that kana can mean ‘zealous, ardent,
passionately involved’ – but it’s main meaning is jealousy, the kind of
jealousy that attaches itself to sexual possessiveness. And you can see that association
in the text when three times in the next verses the narrators introduce the
image of ‘whoring’: it’s a nakedly provocative image, metaphor. ‘You have a
covenant- brit - with Me, Adonai’,
the text says (34:10), so when you enter your promised land you have to destroy
all the altars and pillars and reminders of other gods and goddesses -
otherwise you will form a relationship, a covenant – brit – with them, and whore after their gods (v.15); and it spells
out the process whereby Israel’s God will be betrayed: your men will lust after
the women of the land of Canaan who will be ‘whoring’ after the deities they
know, who will make you Israelite men ‘whore’ after those local, pagan deities.
(The casual misogyny of the text - the power of women to lead men astray –
we just note in passing).

But this text shows what it means
to have a jealous God: possessive, insecure, anxious that in His invisibility
and His essentially enigmatic nature, He just isn’t going to have the presence,
the reality, the attractiveness of all these other competing deities for His
people’s affections. “You must have eyes only for Me. You must have ears only
for Me. You must have hearts dedicated only to Me” – this is the lonely,
demanding Voice we hear in this text. “I have chosen you. Now you have to choose
Me, be faithful only to Me”. The God of Israel implicitly presents Himself –
the narrators present Him – as if God were Israel’s husband and lover :
it’sa metaphor picked up and made
explicit by both Hosea and Jeremiah later in the tradition.

The more you think about it,
the more painful this relationship seems. This green-eyed monster within God
torturing him with images and fantasies of betrayal. But I suppose we need to
ask: is it only fantasies, imaginings, as it was with Othello? Or is God’s
jealousy necessary? Is it understandable? Is it congruent with what goes on in
the psyche of the people of Israel? Does the construction of and worship of the
Golden Calf while Moses is away from the people on Sinai suggest that the Holy
One of Israel has good cause to feel that He isn’t that special in the eyes of
His people? That they have other gods they have their eyes on, other sources of
authority they’d rather dedicate themselves to, prostrate themselves in front
of? What other gods might the Israelite people prefer to follow, the Jewish
people prefer to listen to, than their difficult, demanding, elusive God?

We know the idols we follow
very well. We might not think of them as idols, but they are the modern
equivalents of those old gods with their altars and pillars and sacred groves:
what do we value, where do we put our faith, our belief? We’ll each have our
own anthology of idols, and causes where idolatry is in play: we believe that
money will make us feel secure, or the stock market, or a political party, or
nationalism, or the State of Israel; we believe that science or technology will
sort out the environment; that more CCTV cameras will make us safer, or more
GCHQ hoovering up of communications data will protect us; that better laws on
health and safety will help us to lead happier lives; that nuclear weapons make
us able to sleep safely at night; we believe in inevitable social progress, or put
our faith in medical advances, or ethnic identity, or the civilising value of
the arts, or the practiceof religious
traditions – so many gods we put our faith in, though we never think of them as
gods, they seem real and here and this-wordly.

Whatever mix we construct for
ourselves, we each have our pantheon that is in competition with Adonai – The One Who was, is, will be:
the animating spirit of the universe. No wonder Adonaiis so jealous: His
people are always chasing after security and meaning in one place or another -
the names of the gods and idols change but the process is as old as the hills.

For those who attend to the
Torah’s challenging message, we hear how the Jewish people are bound into a
covenant with a demanding, peripatetic, unseen divine Presence who won’t let
them go, but who then has to suffer dementing levels of frustration, jealousy,
at His beloved people’s inability to stay focused on that special relationship.
We are so easily seduced, the other gods are so present, so attractive, they
make emotional and rational and psychological claims on us. How can we resist? We can’t resist – they have colonised our
minds, our thinking, our believing. Who has the energy, the will-power, to say
no to the easy truths and easy lies-masquerading-as-truths that we are daily
bombarded with?

There are many, many wondrous
and beautiful and uplifting and life-enhancing things in our world, that we can
enjoy, that we can nurture, that we can help create – the godly is around us
and within us. But we have to sort out which of the aspects of our world are
godly, are fragments of Adonai
incarnated in our world – and which aspects of our world are the old idols and
other gods in new names and in new disguises. Does it matter whether we can do
this work, be engaged in this never-ending spiritual and psychological work, of
sorting out which is which? We intuit
that it does matter, somehow, to the well-being of our own lives to be involved
in this spiritual journey; and, as our
Torah, shows, it seems too to matter to God, the Holy One of Israel, that we
keep Him in mind.

God needs to feel special,
just like we need to feel special. So maybe our spiritual work is to give Him a
bit more attention; the Torah’s promise is that it will probably do us good to
do that; and it will do God good too, as it were, so that his jealousy doesn’t
end up destroying the ones he loves - out of a mistaken Othello-like belief
that we are no longer faithful.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue,
March 7th 2015]